Over-eating is the main cause of obesity. In some cases, people are not always consciously aware that they are eating more than their body requires on a daily basis. Often, when over-eating occurs the person does not realise it until there has been a substantial increase in their body weight, and it can be too late to make a small change to their eating habits and improve the situation.
Typically, the monitoring of food intake in terms of events (i.e. when) and quantity is done with self-report diaries, but the effectiveness and quality of this data is down to the discipline of the person and the time they have available to fill them in.
There are several types of devices that can monitor food intake, but these are invasive and/or costly, and include devices such as manometry, scintigraphy, ultrasonography, electrogastrography (EGG), stable isotope breath testing. In addition, the use of these types of devices tends to be confined to the professional settings for the diagnosis of specific eating disorders.
There is therefore a need for an improved method and apparatus that provides a non-invasive and generally unobtrusive solution for monitoring the ingestion of food and/or drink by a subject.